Standing Problems 253This leads to another Nietzschean theme: if wemakerather thandiscovertruth,
then imagination, aesthetics, and creativity take on a crucial role in cognition. In
Rorty’s terms (as for Nietzsche) the poet and aesthete take priority. The self if cre-
ated is essentially an imaginative construction.^25 Theselfbecomesaworkofartor
self-creation. Given that the self and its vocabulary construct the world, there is
nothingintrinsic, foundational, or fundamental to represent.^26 Values (ethical and
otherwise) are not found but created. The heroization of the isolated artist as shaman
in the nineteenth and twentieth century (indeed some argue that art has begun to
replace religion as a key system of values and worship) is symptomatic of the same
movement—except that there has been a democratization of such themes. In this
case, each human being is potentially a playful Zarathustra, as long as they do not
hide in some bogus foundational world focused on reason, a god, or the like.
Self-creation, rather than representation, has come to the fore for most post-
modern practitioners. However, self-creation still remains vaguely rooted if there is
‘something’ for the self to create with, that is, if there is somethingbeyondthe self and
its creativity. In Rorty and Connolly, the self appears to self-create from within a par-
ticular liberal cultural ethos—we engage, work within, ironize about, and play with
the complex pre-understandings of ‘rich lucky liberal states’. However, this ethos of
pre-understandings hasnoontopolitical or ontotheological status; it just happens—
in Rorty’s and Connolly’s cases and much of their readerships’ cases—to be liberal
and democratic. The arguments of Rorty and Connolly are thus addressed to the
potential (updated) Zarathustras of modern Western liberal culture. Such free radical
liberal spirits should be ‘strong ironic poets’, unafraid of the loss of metaphysical and
ontological foundations. Rorty, for example, takes figures such as Proust, Nietzsche,
and Derrida as exemplars of this mentality. Rorty comments: ‘To see one’s language,
one’s conscience, one’s morality, and one’s highest hopes as contingent products,
as...metaphors, is to adopt a self-identity which suits one for citizenship in such
an ideally liberal state’ (Rorty 1989: 61). Oddly, this seems to stop short from a full
recognition of the ambiguity of self-creation, that is, where there is a recognition of
nohorizon,noorder beyond the self.
In summary, in Rorty and Connolly, the following Nietzschean themes are crucial:
truth is ‘made up’ metaphors and not discovered in the world; poetic creativity
(andpoeisis) is set over representation or correspondence; aesthetics is prioritized
over ethics (ethics is in fact created by aesthetics); irony and gaming are set over
knowledge; foundational moral or political beliefs are rejected out of hand in favour
of perspectives and interpretation. There is also an acceptance of difference, set against
all claims for strict identity. Finally, the self-referential or self-reflexive agent is also
set against ontological claims to communal or historical rootedness.
Lyotard and the Differend
There are postmodern theorists who do actually take on the full logic of self-creation,
although they are rarer than one might think. This is self-creation without any